#Young souls release series

The dungeons at first seem to be straightforward, but very quickly the game reveals that there are a multitude of routes that player can take, which leads to some pretty cool Metroidvania-style backtracking to open alternate routes.

#Young souls release series

Making their way into the goblin realm via a gate in the professor's secret lair, Jenn and Tristan delve ever deeper through a series of dungeons, fighting grunts, collecting loots, and taking down bosses along the way. This sets the twins on a journey of self-discovery and goblin slaughter. The professor has been kidnapped by new goblin leadership, and the twins - reeling from the discovery that goblins and magic are real - single-mindedly set out to recover the professor in the most teenage way possible (by kicking every ass that gets in their way). At the beginning of the game, Jenn and Tristan discover that the professor has been working with the local town leadership to establish a relationship with the goblin population that lives beneath the town - something the twins were utterly unaware of. They are animated in a way that highlights just how young they really are, undercutting their street-tough dialogue with their cute little cartoon faces. The twins are glorious creations, all teenaged attitude with a core of vulnerability. Young Souls is the story of Jenn and Tristan, two orphaned twins that have recently been adopted by an absent-minded professor. Like any form of entertainment, if you give the audience some characters to care about and devote time to building them up, then the audience will care so much more about what happens to them. There is a structure built up around that core gameplay that gives the player more things to do than just punch dudes in the face, which makes punching dudes in the face much more fun. Young Souls tells a story, which already puts it heads and tales above the typical 'Chuck and Bub need to beat up all these guys and move to the next screen' story one normally sees in games like this. But I will say that Young Souls has so much great stuff going for it that I was able to look past its place in a genre I dislike, disregarding my prejudice and just engaging with it as a video game. I won't say that Young Souls opened up a doorway for me, and now the scales have been peeled from my eyes and I love beat-em-up games. After all, in my eyes, one of the privileges of writing at a gaming site is getting to try new things, and that often results in me loving things I had no intention of loving. The next thing I knew, I was downloading Young Souls and jumping in. Hey, that looks more like a dungeon crawler than I was expecting. Hmm.those characters are funny and appealing. Oh, I thought, that art style does look pretty cool. I didn't like beat-em-up games because they are shallow and dumb, so I didn't try Young Souls.īut leading up to Young Souls' recent release on consoles and PC, the game kept creeping into the periphery of my vision. But as much as I trusted these folks and their judgement, I still didn't engage. There was something more to it, they said, something that gave the game actual stakes and heart. The buzz around the game reached a low rumble in the Stadia community, and it seemed like everyone I knew on Google's platform was screaming about the greatness of Young Souls. When Young Souls dropped on Stadia last year, I saw that a lot of my Twitter friends were enjoying the game. I didn't like them, so I didn't try overly hard, so I sucked and died a lot. Games like Scott Pilgrim just felt like so much button mashing I would lose track of my character instantly amongst the chaos.

The entire genre just felt like an excuse for arcade machines to eat my quarters I didn't understand how anyone could get good enough at these games to make them worth playing. Though my friends would gravitate straight towards them, I didn't like the Turtles, the X-Men, or the Simpsons arcade machines. As a kid, I actively avoided the genre in the arcades.